Solarpunk has always had a tricky aesthetic task. It is easy, now, for us to imagine the high energy cyberpunk urban dystopia, with all it’s ugly, garish, chromey grime. Solarpunk set out to envision the alternative to that, somewhere beautiful, temperate, green, and healthy — but still ‘punk,’ still infused…

What was most fucked up was how normal everything was. Even though everyone agreed that nothing was normal, and in fact the world was Changed and might never be normal again, from another angle — for me at least — things were more normal than ever before. I woke up…

reptoid 7–9ft shape shifting serpents which own night clubs in Sri Lanka. Reptoids are native to the antartic, and control the planet. Some people think Reptoids can time travel, but this is probably bullshit. Though they can travel on the astral plane. -Urban Dictionary Recently a friend of mine —…

How speculative fiction thinks about social change. Today the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative released Everything Change, Volume II, a short story anthology collecting the finalists of their 2018 Climate Fiction Contest. I had the honor of having my story “Sunshine State,” cowritten with Adam Flynn, included in the first Everything Change collection. …

How science fiction about artificial intelligence uses horror tropes to explore our fears about minds and bodies. It’s no coincidence that the first science fiction story was a horror story. As legend has it, Mary Shelley (then Godwin) was spending a rainy summer with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and other…

Cold open on Xandar. It’s a beautiful, utopian planet we got glimpses of in GotG. Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) is getting interviewed by Nova-Prime Glenn Close for a job with the Nova Corps. Right off the bat we are seeing the stitching together of Marvel’s several tonally and mythologically distinct domains…

A few weeks ago, in a fit of sleeplessness, I wrote an essay about the election. I intended to post this essay on election night. …

Can the new Tumblr-grown aesthetic break through the smog to change the Twenty-First Century conversation? I. Something Stirs It is the nature of our era to stymie the exploration of political alternatives. We live in a fog that obscures our possibilities. We are moving very fast, but tumbling without sense of direction or…